Re: GDate

[Kevin Handy <kth srv net>]

At 01:32 AM 11/25/98 -0600, you wrote:
[snip]
>
>> Why not include times in the GDate structure?
>> A date without a time is useless since it may be Sunday in California
>> and Monday morning in Europe.  Timezone's impact the date, and therefore
>> time impacts the date.  Times must be included for this interface to
>> be acceptable.  I think the Java interface should be cloned.
>> 
>
This quote bothered me the first time I saw it, and it bothered be
again when I saw it again.

There are a lot of applications that want a date without a
time attached. If you get an invoice from 'Acme Rockets', and are
entering it into your accounting system, what time would you put
on it? You still need to play with the dates (Is this invoice past due,
how old is it, how many days do we have till we lose the discount,
is what they entered valid, etc). Most business accounting doesn't
care about time-zones (anyone commonly make their invoices due on
25-Dec-1998 at 10:37AM?)

If you want to worry about the time for a specific location, then
you will also have to include the timezone along with the time, or
do all of your work in UCT time.

Data entry clerks around the world would be terribly upset about
having to look up and enter all that extra information, and start
searching for you with with excessive firepower.

If you want a location-specific date-time you can create another
library (that makes use of a date library, and a time library),
but wrapping all of it together would be much less useful than
having three separate libraries.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Handy  kth@srv.net         Accounting Software for
Software Solutions. Inc.         VAX/VMS Computer Systems
Idaho Falls, Idaho